Essay Questions

How can the reader reconcile the concept of imprinting with a non-Twilight system of values?

There are many concepts throughout the Twilight series which are given to the characters involved as things to accept due to the strange nature of the novel's world. This breaking of the fourth wall endures characters such as Bella and her father to the reader, but by Breaking Dawn, these possibilities for plot advancement have largely been exhausted.

The concept of imprinting is taken to its furthest conclusion in this novel, and characters are once again told to accept it as fact, no matter how much they want to reject it. Because of this, the reader must take the emotions connected to imprinting as valid, even if they disagree with them. The rift created in the face of how strongly these experiences are different than the ones in our normal world is not fully accounted for by the narration, as it is in stories such as Lolita; because of this, the reader must follow the discomfort and difficult feelings felt by some characters to navigate the schism.

How can a child who lives at a faster rate than the ordinary child be raised?

The child is born into a life that does not mirror that of anyone else, so the question of parenting is already individual. The parents ought to put off the urge to pathologize the child's growth, and the pattern throughout the novel of casting experiences as alien to ordinary human life should be minimized, so as to protect the ability of a child to exist without observation all of the time.

Moreover, the child should be raised from a place of listening for indicators of maturity instead of from a state of being monitored or tracked day-to-day. This allows for the constant fluctuations of development everyone experiences while maturing.

What does violence mean to the mostly-immortal characters in Breaking Dawn?

The characters in Breaking Dawn are drawn to heroic narratives, and battle scenes of classical antiquity provided the warriors with the chance to die a noble death. The adherence to this aesthetic vision shows that the characters wish to be able to pursue something other than their own survival, which requires violence. To fight allows them to seize the humanity within themselves and provide themselves with the concept of an ordinary death, something that was stolen from them by the transition to vampirism.